When it comes to urban transportation, the narrative has long been dictated by two main players: Uber and Lyft. They built multi-billion-dollar empires optimizing for the single passenger. But when it came to moving a group of eight, ten, or fourteen people, the market couldn’t accommodate. You either split up into four separate cars or you pay an exorbitant deposit for a clunky charter bus with a three-hour minimum.
Matthew Iommi, Co-Founder and CEO of Fetii, looked at this friction point and saw an empire waiting to be built.
In a recent episode of Y’all Street, Iommi sat down with host Evan to break down how a scrappy, Texas-based startup took on the legacy transit industry, survived the ultimate macroeconomic black swan, and secured backing from billionaire Mark Cuban.
Finding the Friction
Great go-to-market strategies rarely start in a boardroom; they start in the dirt. Iommi’s journey began during his senior year at Texas A&M when he and his co-founder bought a used party bus off Facebook Marketplace. Iommi drove the routes himself, dealing directly with rowdy college crowds and taking notes on exactly where the legacy system was failing.
The core problem wasn’t the vehicle; it was the payment structure. One person in a friend group was always forced to pay the upfront bus cost, hoping their friends would eventually Venmo it back.
Drawing inspiration from the WeChat ecosystem he witnessed while studying in Beijing, Iommi engineered a completely frictionless solution. Fetii upgraded its fleet to agile, 15-passenger transit vans equipped with proprietary QR codes. When a group piled in, every individual scanned the code to pay their exact share of the ride instantly.
The friction was dead. The demand was explosive.
“I always tell founders, the biggest mistake is creating features and a product based on what you want… don’t do it for yourself. Don’t do it for the VCs. If you do things for the customers, it’s going to pan out well in the long term.”
Matthew Iommie
The “God Mode” Growth Hack
To scale the platform aggressively, Iommi didn’t burn millions of dollars on Facebook ads. He utilized a brilliant, boots-on-the-ground viral marketing strategy dubbed “God Mode.”
Fetii identified key social nodes within the university ecosystem—fraternity presidents, sorority chairs, and club leaders. They granted these hyper-connected individuals “God Mode” on the Fetii app, giving them 50% to 100% off their personal rides.
The psychology was flawless. When a group of 12 friends needed to get to the bars, the influencer with “God Mode” had an immediate financial incentive to loudly advocate for taking a Fetii. They rode for free, while the other 11 friends seamlessly downloaded the app and paid full price. Fetii effectively turned local influencers into a highly motivated, zero-cost sales force that herded paying customers directly onto the platform.
The Ultimate Pivot
By January 2020, Fetii had proven its product-market fit and was preparing to raise institutional capital. Then, COVID-19 shut down the world. Ridership plummeted to zero.
“We had to figure something out,” Iommi recalled. Instead of folding the company, Iommi cold-emailed the Chief Information Officer of the Texas A&M University System with a bold B2G (Business-to-Government) pivot.
Fetii offered to retrofit its proprietary QR code check-in software for placement on classroom doors and university laboratories, instantly converting its rideshare technology into a campus-wide contact-tracing application. The university bought the pitch, and that contract provided the precise operational runway Fetii needed to survive until the economy reopened.
The Bottom Line
When Iommi hit the venture capital circuit, the market was deeply distracted by crypto and fintech startups. He pitched 70 different VC firms and was rejected 70 times. He applied to the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator three times and was rejected three times.
He didn’t care. He applied a fourth time—and got in.
That relentless resilience eventually caught the attention of Mark Cuban’s family, leading directly to a massive, founder-friendly investment from the billionaire himself. Today, Fetii transports over 2.2 million passengers annually and is actively deploying advanced AI to optimize stadium egress nationwide.
Fetii’s success proves that you don’t need a coastal zip code or a frictionless path to build a dominant enterprise. You just need the grit to out-hustle the room, the agility to pivot when the market breaks, and the wisdom to never be married to a single path.
Watch as Matthew Iommi breaks down the business of group rideshare and AI integration on Episode 42 of Y’all Street.
